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View Full Version : Chrome killing SSDs? Ramdisks and other goodies.


Sully
April 15th, 2011, 10:27 AM
I recently came across documentation on how chrome is pretty disk I/O intensive, and read up on how it can 'possibly' effect the life of an SSD drive. I have never worried too much about that, but after reading how much chrome does, I got to thinking maybe I should cut out excessive I/O where I can.

Many of you might have seen that chrome offers no UI that can change the cache settings. There are some flags to do this though
--disk-cache-dir="path to cache directory" --disk-cache-size=size of cache in bytes

Anyway, after looking into this I found what some are doing is either redirecting the cache to a normal hdd or to a ram disk. Some are just setting the cache size to 1 which essentially creates a 1mb cache. You can also redirect the cache directory to '/dev/null' which then creates no cache that I can find. I have tried all 3 methods, but haven't decided yet which if any I will pursue beyond testing.

What are your thoughts?

Sul.

Robin A.
April 15th, 2011, 11:40 AM
-{ Quote: "... There are some flags to do this though
--disk-cache-dir="path to cache directory" --disk-cache-size=size of cache in bytes
Sul." }-

How are these flags set? Where are they?

Sully
April 15th, 2011, 12:20 PM
you can do a search for command line parameters of chrome, and there are a number of sites that list them as well as straight from the chromium projects. But all you need to do is add those to the shortcut.

Sul.

m00nbl00d
April 15th, 2011, 12:48 PM
I've been using those command switches for quite some time.

vasa1
April 15th, 2011, 01:35 PM
-{ Quote: "How are these flags set? Where are they?" }-

http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/

J_L
April 15th, 2011, 09:12 PM
An SLC SSD won't be affected as much as a MLC.

doktornotor
April 16th, 2011, 06:34 AM
Chrome uses extensive caching. Sounds like a good idea. (Unless you take another good idea and avoid SSD completely.)

newbino
April 16th, 2011, 08:46 AM
Thanks Sully for the pointer. BTW, a web search brought me to this site (http://www.simplehelp.net/2010/11/16/how-to-change-the-google-chrome-cache-location) which suggests also that -{ Quote: "Chrome needs to be configured to use the newly defined cache folder for opening previously visited links in the history" }-
Any thoughts on that?